


Things That Get Second Chances

by orphan_account



Category: Yggdra Union
Genre: Angst, Fever Dreams, Gen, Love, Video Game Mechanics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 10:40:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11553495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: But things have gotten second chances that others wouldn’t afford. Snakes, rats, Nietzsche gives them her snacks, and Bronquians – they just die.Though sometimes those animals just go into her mouth whole.-Collected scenes from the sack of Ishnad.





	Things That Get Second Chances

**Author's Note:**

> hi i literally just finished this game and i will never stop crying

They’re going to blow it all open. They have to get there first. Milanor pins his ear against the stone cliff, closes his eyes and waits for noise. When there is none, he waves his hands. His boys, his dogs, hustle past. They’d look like actual wolves if anyone but him was watching.

Elena is watching. He always has to signal before she acts. She reads bibles now, she’s quiet, she watches, she’s eerie. A good person who always looks cool, it’s just, he’s used to people who make noise. 

Yggdra has gotten so dang quiet, these days.

When times are like this he can see things others do not. He’s had that talent, to see war like a bird or a god, he knows when people are coming and that’s how he’s always won his steals and his kills. Tonight he sees things that way again. He slams his fist against the wall and the pattering steps of his boys taper to nothing.

“Master?” Elena asks. “Sir.”

“Someone’s going to stop them at the end of this road. Come on.”

He doesn’t have to hide; no one’s here to notice; the boys proved that. The water of the sea echoes below them, oddly muted, but it might just be his ears. Sometimes he has to be told things twice. It’s gotten that bad. His boys are tense, anyway, fidgeting.

“What’s happening, bossanova?”

“I don’t know what, but keep your eye out.” Milanor’s breath comes out like smoke. “We’re turning that corner. Switch is back there.”

“Boss,” one guy whispers, “I don’t know how to swim!”

“Then don’t trip over a rock or anything like that so you can run.”

“What a mighty good time,” says one, his old guy, All Thumbs.

“Gonna get roasted,” says another.

No one is looking up, but ahead. They run. It seems like no one should be at the top of those cliffs. He does not know it until he hears the clacking of wood and he’s only just turned his head, Elena’s aimed and there’s no arrow and her eyes have gone only a little wide.

He knows the body that falls, it’s just their special force woman. Cracks on the ground before them and the rest of the assassins scatter, Elena just gets another one. It’s not going to matter soon. They will be dead either way. Milanor turns the commander’s body over with his foot.

“Oh, thank god,” is what All Thumbs says. His voice whistles through his teeth.

-

They blow the gate. When the water freezes over, there is enough to fill a chasm.

The royal army doesn’t know what’s going to become of all those people; only some of them take the risk to grab their remaining belongings and chase after the fleeing squadrons, wherever they were going – maybe to the capital, or simply scattering, as far away from the war as they can. Those who remain try to bolt down their walls again, to rebuild what they could before the winter truly set in.

I don’t know if many of them made it.

There are coats of all kinds and colors in the royal army, from the kingdom or their homelands or their mothers or raided from shattered, icy rooms. Milanor has returned and he has his pack of dogs, literal and not – with their pelts on, the only way you can tell the difference between them all is which ones are taller than the rest. Their breaths turn to ice in the night. Those men, the whole pack, scuttle ahead of everyone but Yggdra, far into the dark.

 

 

This is before the gate is open. Everyone is awake, in their tents, trying to stay warm before the blizzard, or playing games. It’s quiet. Then the dogs start howling and everyone runs. Most have their weapons, some have their fists, but they all gather where the dogs snap and fight their chains and the people stare, minds muddy with sleep.

People let Mistel through when she comes. She recognizes the haircuts she’s given some of them just hours ago. People are holding back Milanor’s stray dogs from barking and biting. People are staring. People don’t understand what’s going on. Mistel can’t even read the situation when she finally gets to the front of the commotion and it’s one of their swordsmen slamming his fist onto Durant’s helmet, Durant wrestling in that man’s armlock, other men gathered around something, anything, and they are all screaming at each other.

“You don’t know what we’ve been through! You don’t know anything!”

“No! Fuck off!”

“Mistel, help me!”

“You don’t understand!”

“Shove your fist up your ass, sir! We’re defending ourselves—”

One man threw down his villager’s body and the others melted aside for him to push Durant, and Durant, god help him, so exhausted, staggered back. And that gave the soldier the fuel to get in his face, even as he was wheezing for breath. “They come here – trying to steal our horses! Our food! So damn stuck in themselves they didn’t think the horses would scream for help! We have been taking cannonfire for—” He puts up what’s left of his fingers and it might have been the sign for six when he yowls, “Six! Fucking! Days! And they think they can – they think they can—”

“Stand down—”

“This is what they do to us! This is what they’re like!” His eyes were wide and he stomped around, yelling to the crowd, “Just hang them all! Kill them all! And whoever wants to let them do it, we’ll hang you too! We’ll fucking hang—”

Blood goes down his face but it’s just his nose, thank god, and he says again “Mistel—!”

“Fuck you, fuck everyone who wants to save them, fuck them and fuck their friends—”

She doesn’t know if Durant was just holding back, or if it is simply that he will do the impossible for Yggdra’s sake.

He has been taking cannon strikes all day. All month.

“Your Majesty.”

People are in all different postures, Durant has broken out of the hold so he can be on his knee and other people bowing at the waist or neck and others simply trying to shrink away. Even the dogs are quiet. One of them whines. That yelling soldier, he is only peeking over his shoulder. The villagers are dangling by fists. They are dead by now.

“Please,” she says. “Your Highness.”

The queen strides towards them, pulling a soldier’s greatcoat too large for her body as close as she can. Her retainers are packed close to her, swords drawn or nearly ready.

These are men who wouldn’t listen to anyone else: famished, exhausted, who have gone above and beyond their line of duty against these merciless knights, deaf to everyone’s voices but the queen’s own. And it’s not simply because of her title. 

“Queen—”

“Not yet.”

“You are to me.”

Hands up on his face to get him to look, she checks him for something, it might be his morale. Runs her thumbs over his cheeks until his suppressed sobs subside. She moves onto the next and they might be a little bit jealous of each other, bunching up as close as they can get before the leader of the retainers clears her throat. 

At the end Yggdra comes down and the men, instinctively, bend down with her.

She reads their pulse. There is none. Her hands come up dark.

-

Mistel doesn’t want to say she’s getting old – certainly, she is not. But her grandfather says this is a part of it: Yggdra just seems so little.

This isn’t over, by the way. There’s still something more Mistel has to say.

But in just hours, the gate breaks, and there is no saying anything. There is war.

 

 

Gulcasa rarely, if ever, sleeps in the midst of his fever. It is pain and it is punishment. He doesn’t know whose hands are touching him, soaking his face. Wiping his skin. He can’t even open his eyes without his vision being blurry beyond recognition and nausea sloshing his being.

People have him by the knees and shoulders. Someone sinks his body in water, hot water. Hands rubbing his shoulders, chest, back – no, no one is doing that right now. There’s only one person who would: On nights like this Nessiah would ease into his touch, and mutter something about how he couldn’t help himself around Gulcasa.

Whenever Nessiah joined him, the water didn’t so much as ripple. Mud would come off of his feet, he wouldn’t scrub his skin, he wasn’t even sure if Nessiah was aware of how it stuck onto himself. He didn’t seem aware of anything clinging to him.

Except Gulcasa. Maybe Gulcasa.

-

He had never been aware of how soft another person’s skin could be. He had just held Nessiah’s hand once to help him over a gap. That night, Gulcasa rubbed his hand out of compulsion, calloused and awful. 

Their hands were nothing like anyone else’s. Not Siskier’s, not Jenon’s, not—

-

In his delirium, he will remember and he will think he knows why Nessiah left:

(“I have forgotten how far I can reach with that hand and it’s really quite troublesome” Nessiah says lowers his hand Gulcasa moves it down for him

“When did it stop?” he snaps. “Can you still do it? Can you – is that how you know – is that how we win?”

“It was when I was very young, before – before I had this. I don’t see anything anymore, at all.”

Numbers and words and restarts, how many stars, “I could see them too. Nessiah, I didn’t know what they were then but I saw them. I could tell, if, if Aegina got hurt one more time she wouldn’t, that, that Leon’s lance wasn’t going to last the next battle, Nessiah, I just, kn-kn-knew—”

“I don’t understand—”

“It helped me. I could stop things, Nessiah! I could change them! I could stop them, and I don’t know what’s going to happen from now on— If Baldus and Aegina don’t, if they killed them—”

“Let go.” He’s crushing Nessiah’s hands and releases them. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, pulls his hands back, Nessiah can’t even get them back out while Gulcasa keeps going on, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I thought it was going to stop if I ever told someone and I didn’t think anyone would believe me, if I knew you would I would have but, Nessiah—”

“You were never obliged to tell me.”

“Nessiah.”

Gulcasa speaks again, and he does not say this:

“I woke up one time and everyone was here. Siskier. Luciana. Just…here. You weren’t there. I hurt you. I – I hurt you, I don’t know how but I—”

He does not say the truth.)

He is wrong.

-

Gulcasa remembers the water—

Gulcasa wakes up.

-

“I’m right here. Gulcasa, I’m right here.”

These days he’s not even sure if Emilia is real. “Nessiah. Where’s—”

“He’ll come back. He always has. He just – had to find another bridge to get here.” It’s been months. “It’s just the war stopping him.” It’s been months. She believes every word she’s said. She’s going to smack him on the chest a few times and cry. He’s going to see how tall she’s become since he’s left.

He will be so proud.

-

His heart is the heart of the land. Brongaa’s heart is his own. Brongaa is this earth.

Something in his land has broken.

It will be a long night before his fever breaks, too. And by then, it will already be far too late.

 

 

You must understand that it’s hardest to serve those who still care. Mistel’s grandfather knew this because he had seen a swath of monarchs in his life. She was never meant to follow him, but he still taught her the math. No matter what. Even on the ride under the cover of the sleeping night, the two of them were stacked together on a donkey while her mother and King Ordene’s only trusted knight led the way through the mountains. Her grandfather slept at strict times, but for the only time in her life, his voice lulled her through unsettled hours – about leadership, referred to here as gen, imagine them as stars, Mistel, for the kings believe it is the stars that guide them, that if one’s strength is in greater number than one’s gen, they have calculated exact percentages estimated and reduced into those larger stars…

Their charts and maps are filled with equations fathomless to Durant, whose only job is to carry them out. Yggdra knows the ruling card, which spirit stands with them that hour, and if the map is right and the gods are present, it will happen. There are bad odds, negative probabilities, but they have beaten them before. Yggdrasil is withering and Brongaa’s star hangs above their heads. X can trump O if there is water and the times are right. These are extraordinary times.

So, even though it is early in the season and it is freezing, some people stand in the open, waiting for the coming of the storm. It’s as safe as it can get. Bronquia’s diviners must have seen the same signs; cannonballs aren’t firing and they might not be able to in this wind. Everyone in the castle must be bolstering down. The birds have long left the woods. The clouds are great and they are dark.

Mistel is inside before the wind strikes, grateful she’d kept the stove with them all through their marches. She carried it herself when people thought it’d be better to leave behind. These tents have been made to stand in storms where no man can walk, but they rarely are warm. The little girl, Nietzsche, is sensitive to these changes in weather. She burrows next to Rosary and Rosary lets her.

“She ought to be here,” Mistel says.

Rosary instantly knows who Mistel is talking about. 

“I’d find her. But—”

“Keeping the kids warm?”

“They’re fine.” It became a big undine pile within a few minutes and Rosary is in charge of them, as it usually ends up. She makes the customary scowl expected of her nature, but doesn’t shew them away. “Yggdra’s been avoiding us. Strange, isn’t it?” She’s trying to sound haughty but can’t get the high pitch of worry out of her tone. “How is she doing?”

“I wouldn’t take it personally. She’s overwhelmed. She hasn’t even spoken to me, lately. I think even Durant only gets her thanks, and nothing else. No, she gave him socks and a book, and she was gone. Just like that.” Durant had turned from a commoner to a nobleman from this war alone. He has learned to stop asking questions.

“Well, she’s probably just thinking of a plan, for when we get actually into that place,” Rosary says.

“You’ve gotten out of saying ‘if.’”

“When she has an idea, there’s no saying no. I don’t think even her god can stop her.” Rosary smiles a little. Even that tiny curve can’t hide how fond she is. Then she frowns again. But seriously, where is she? If she’s frozen to death, I’m getting out of here and getting my ankh back myself.”

“Always you and that little thing! Well, I need to gather wood, so I may as well see if she isn’t a statue already.” There’s plenty of wood for the fire, lying in plain sight, but Mistel gears up two layers of warm clothes. “If I freeze out there, just leave me there. When I thaw out in spring, I can be food for the birds!”

It hasn’t been storming long. The ground should have still been a bit warm, but the snow is already past Mistel’s ankles as she wades through the storm. Her steps crunch so gently. It’s eerie.

Mistel knows the stations of the dark tents enough to eventually navigate her way to the bridge, drawn up since the knights aren’t charging. She wouldn’t think that dark brown lump was a person, maybe a tree, but not a queen. Not until she gets up close – and where else would Yggdra be, but the one standing watch in spite of it all?

Mistel stands close to her, next to her ear. “Whose coat is that?”

Always a second before Yggdra responds. “Roswell’s?” Her eyes dart in thought. She shakes her head. “No,” Yggdra says.

“Another soldier. 

“He insisted.”  
  
  
Sometimes, Mistel wonders how many times they have lost. Sometimes, she wonders how many things Yggdra has to keep track of. Sometimes, Mistel wonders how things are doing on the other side, where Yggdra had made different decisions, and how she can help.

Mistel has seen her monarch at midnight, lying crossways before the stove on her belly, stripped down to a shift. Mistel has swatted her awake multiple times with the towel in her apron’s belt. Mistel seen her asleep or in blood and has wondered if she would ever wake up.

Is it even possible to help, at this point?  
  
  
“And you don’t know how to say no. How would you say he looks? And if you approve - might you send him my way?”

“I wouldn’t recognize his face unless he reminded me.”

“Did your retainers kick you out of the tent?” she teases. “That’s to be expected! No one would want to share a tent with you if you don’t wash up.”

Yggdra’s voice is muffled, her face in the dirt. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“And I’m sorry for not keeping track, but—” you’ve been hiding—

“You’ve been busy. Please don’t apologize. There’s a lot to do and not enough people to do it.”

Her feet are dark, like paws, from the muddy slush that seeps through her shoes as winter comes around again. Like branches, they were made hold up the weight of her body and her blade. Born that way, through her blood.

Mistel slings one of her coats over Yggdra’s shoulders. She accepts that Yggdra might not notice any change. “Do you feel okay?”

“Yes.”

“Now, say that to my face.”

Yggdra doesn’t say anything to her face. She just looks tired. “After a little while, you stop thinking of them as people. They become numbers. I can see their faces, but they all look the same to me now. Is it that way for you?”

“Not for me. But I imagine there are some of us here who think in a similar way. Not the same way,” she says, obviously, “but similar.”

“I see.”

She thinks everyone has a feeling like that. Early in the war, she learned that Yggdra had been witness to this herself – executing two men who did unthinkable things to captured Bronquian soldiers. There are better men who simply don’t care who is at the end of their blade, what their stories are. And for everyone – it is so hard for them to raise their eyes over the queen. They look anywhere but her face.

“Well, if you ask me, I think that’s what happens when you get too cold! There’s a fresh fire in Rosary’s tent – well, it’s not just her tent. It’s a whole bunch of us girls, now – and if you join us, it should just take you ten minutes before you start to feel better.”

-

There are several people Yggdra loves or has loved, in here and in other times. She puts those facts to Mistel every now and then, as though the act of saying them out loud would deny their power. Love doesn’t work that way, but nor are people supposed to work the way the Artwaltz family does.

There’s someone she loves here. It’s one hour before the gate breaks. When it does, with everything that follows, it’s going to be much too late to make those feelings clear.

-

In another time, she simply can’t find Yggdra out here, but Roswell. He is a man, Yggdra should know, Yggdra as said, who is a man of solitude. He is like briars in the forest. He seeks no one’s hand; he wanders the forest looking for bones.

When the flood breaks the castle, in Roswell’s time he takes the bodies and adds them to their army. In Rosary’s time, what’s left of the walls becomes her golems. The general’s body is commended to the earth and the bodies of their army shall be cast into the sea.

Elena and the dog boy come home. They're about to cross into the land of her blood. The worst is yet to come and Yggdra is going to bear it all before anyone else - even Elena - standing like a figurehead on a prow of a ship riding into thunder.

She’s changed. God, she’s changed. She’s changed since they found her in Lost Aries, all tattered and almost unraveled. They have traveled so far to find her again. They have traveled so far to get here. And there is so much farther left to go, Mistel thinks – so many ways still, that they can lose her for good.

**Author's Note:**

> my lp for this was roughly 75k words long
> 
> this land is a desert and i am the boss
> 
> i will write a gorillion fanfics and no one will stop me.


End file.
